Toby is a TurtleGraphics language and learning environment, similar,
in many ways, to LOGO. You have a cute triangle that you move around
the screen with simple commands: go forward, turn right, etc. With
these commands you can construct fascinating games, works of art,
and outlets of expression. It's fascinating and useful for everyone
from early childhood to late adulthood.

TurtleGraphics have been noted by many psychologists and educators
to be a powerful aid in teaching geometry, spatial perception,
logic skills, computer programming, and art. Toby builds on the
work of LOGO by cleaning up the syntax of the programming language
itself, enabling students to dive into the software more easily,
while at the same time giving them a better lesson in what clean,
maintainable software looks like.

It may seem a bit intimidating to boast that a software package can
be aimed at such a large age group, and be a good teaching device
that also happens to better prepare students for high-paying
technical jobs, but it's true; the value of TurtleGraphics are
undisputably enriching in many fields.

For several years now, one of the development goals of Toby has been
cross-platform support. A program is of no use if it won't run on
your computer. To that end, the current stable release of Toby is
written in Java 1.2, which allows it to run on most computers and
operating systems, whether you have an iMac or a Windows box or
Linux running on a Sparc mainframe.

The current development version of Toby, however, is a rewrite
(rewrite #5, to be specific) in C and C++. The goal is more flexibility
and performance speed without a loss in portability. Indeed, we are
targeting platforms that have no Java support in the first place.
The vision of being able to use Toby on your Palm Pilot will be
realized yet.

Toby's educational value does not stop with the program; all
versions of Toby are available in source code form, so the advanced
(and the curious) may poke around under the hood to see what makes
Toby tick. In fact, the license Toby uses requires that the source
code always be available to those that want to take a look, so that
others might learn and benefit from it.

The best source of documentation right now is myself; do not
hesistate to email me
with questions about the installation, the program itself, or the
philosophy behind it. I love email. :)

Downloads:

Prepackaged source code:

Current stable version
("rewrite #3"). This is the last version in Java. Any further
work on it will probably just be bugfixes, and not
enhancements. It is, however, very usable. This version
featured a much-enhanced interpreter, more functions,
strings, arrays, multilingual support, and a ton of other
cool stuff. Not to mention a sanely-layed out source code tree.

Please use the Mercurial repository for anything else.

Downloading from Mercurial:

Toby's source code may be downloaded using
Mercurial (aka: "hg").
Hg allows you to get up-to-the-minute fixes and enhancements; as a
developer works on a source tree, you can use hg to mirror that source
tree instead of waiting for an official release. Please look at the
Mercurial website
for more information on using hg, where you can also download
software for Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix systems.

Toby is no longer hosted in a CVS or Subversion repository. You have to
use hg or wait for an official release.

Contributions of any sort, including hardware, money, software,
source modifications, and testimonials are always very welcome and
highly appreciated. I make no money off my work on Toby, and do it
in my spare time for the betterment of myself and others. Still,
donations are a great way to keep this project going at full
steam. If you'd like to make a donation of any kind (monetarily or
otherwise), please email me
and we'll talk.

Previous contributions:

LinuxFund.org graciously
gave me a grant of 1,000 dollars to continue my work on Toby. This
money went towards RAM upgrades for my development box, an iMac that
produced Toby for MacOS and LinuxPPC, and a CD burner so that I can
take physical copies of Toby on disc to schools. Much thanks!